THE BATS: A novel chapter

3.

Liana had still been in bed in San Francisco when the doorbell rang. She threw on a robe to greet a Federal Express woman at the door with a letter package from Mexico.

“What is it?” Richard called sleepily.

The package was marked “commercial samples.” Inside she found a Ziploc bag full of fine, dark gray ash.

The return address was the house in Mexico, but as no courier pickups reached that remote stretch of lake, somebody must have driven it to Pátzcuaro. Who had drawn that macabre task? She didn’t trust that bag of ashes any more than an NPR news brief that morning on her father’s passing.

She and Richard had stayed up late, tweaking a beta version of a photo application they’d developed that a search engine juggernaut planned to acquire. Contracts were being drawn up, and if things went as planned, in a few weeks’ time the buyout would finally put some real change in their pockets.

A few hours later, her brother called from Malibu, fresh out of rehab, his voice trembling. He’d gotten a Fedex too.

The Chronicle ran an obit the next day: Maverick director Peter Altos found dead at seventy-one at his lakeside home in Mexico. It cited the influential early features, the globetrotting troupe, his abortive Hollywood period, his running battles with the IRS. They ran an early photo of her parents in a pirogue there on the lake in Mexico, he gaunt and grinning, his wife Mina seated in a white cotton dress with a Chiapan shawl flung over her shoulders. It noted her mother’s drowning, his trial and acquittal, and the film he reputedly spent his last years working on.

That afternoon, Liana said, “Richard, I have to go down there.”

“No you don’t.”

“Somebody has to. Nico’s in no shape.”

“You haven’t been in Tezcatlan since you were fifteen. What’s there for you?”

“A past. A house. A painting I want.”

“You always told me the house would go to the family lawyer.”

“Maybe find out what happened to my mother.”

“The only person who knew that is dead now.”

“Three days down, three back. A week in Tezcatlan.”

“Drive down? What are you thinking? It’s narco territory, a war zone. We sign contracts in two weeks.”

Packing that evening, she couldn’t decide what to do with her wedding ring. Richard had presented it to her in a French bistro on San Pablo Street in Palo Alto six years earlier. She wanted to leave it behind for reasons of safety but feared he might misunderstand. Come to think of it, where was his wedding band lately? She decided to lock the ring in the glove compartment of the car.

*

Merced, Vegas, Tucson. I-10 east through Deming in the desolate heat, her father’s alleged ashes on the car seat beside her. Coals to Newcastle, but damned if she was going to let him make the last move. If he was really gone, she’d scatter the ashes where they belonged, in the lake. If it was one of his crazy jokes and he lurched out from behind the velvet curtain in the sala, she’d fling them in his face. What had he thought, that she’d stuff a pillow and sleep on them?

Richard had offered to come but she didn’t want that. He belonged to the edifice of clear reasonable achievement she’d spent years erecting. He’d delivered himself often enough of his take on her parents: “Dissolute old hedonists. Bad wine, bad weed, bad art.” Richard, elegant at writing code, found the Altos code unreadable if not contemptible. He didn’t understand the good there and she’d never reveal to him the depths of the bad.

After a fitful night at a Motel 6 in El Paso – CNN drowning out a biker couple groaning through sex next door – she crossed the bridge at dawn into the empty killing streets of Ciudad Juarez, alert to every movement.

South on the deserted toll road past Chihuahua. Saguaro cactuses festooned with plastic bags swept by like sentinels, the bottle of drinking water beside her hotter than the late June air. Foolish to drive when she could have flown to Morelia and rented a car, but she wanted to haul that painting back. And she needed time to think.

A parent dies, you go back to wrap things up. Isn’t that what you do? This sounded normal enough, though her family’s life had been anything but that. What could Richard or his Bay Area friends know of waking up under a minivan outside of Fez in the rain, a troupe actor on acid pissing right next to your head? Huddling half-starved under a blanket with your baby brother in an unheated East Village walkup while your parents did a play? Wearing the same clothes for weeks because they were too busy fighting or fucking or filming to notice?

The pale Durango mountains rimmed a horizon bare of promise, the radio narrating narcocorrido ballads of death and betrayal. Three weeks earlier, she’d flown to LA to bail her brother out after police had found Nico wandering half-clothed in Topanga Canyon, threatening to set fires. Taking his shot in Hollywood, getting roles but not enough to quit his day job, sitting in front of a bank of screens with headphones on in an office in Thousand Oaks making cold sales calls in Spanish, gulping his meds, a suicide helpline cued on his speed dial.

She pulled into high Zacatecas just after nightfall. In the dim, noisy lounge of an old miners’ hotel off the plaza, gripping a chilled Dos XX, she sifted through half-lit memories of the ex-convent by the lake that had served as the family home.

What do you rescue from the past, what let go? What is forgiven, what not? What is outrun, what never?

She tried to imagine the house she’d once fled anew: as a refuge, a site of succor, to allay her brother’s helplessness and dread, and her own.

A house of ghosts, Richard had called it. Maybe I need to meet those ghosts, she whispered to the silent flat-screen monitor overhead.

By daybreak she was back on the road, pulling into Tezcatlan late that afternoon.